WordPress Upgrades

Keeping your Wordpress site healthy and secure

We can support your business with regular website updates and health checks to make sure your site is effective, easy to use and secure. Our development team has given their top 6 reasons to make sure your WordPress site is up to date:

1. Security – Probably the most important factor for both you and your customers, you want to ensure you website doesn’t go down or gets damaged by hackers. Given the new GDPR regulations around data protection, getting hacked is also a big deal for your users, with any lost personal or banking details being very damaging for your brand. Each WordPress update includes a number of security updates so can help keep everyone safe.

2. Compatibility – Most WordPress sites are built using a series of plugins and themes. These can be anything from simple contact forms or image carousels but can also include payment gateways and other functionality core to your site’s user journey. These plugins will automatically update when new versions are available, but this can cause problems when your site isn’t up to date, and lead to your site to not work as intended, like stopping users from paying for their cart.

3. Performance and speed – Your site needs to be working at it’s best to give a good experience to users and to convert as much traffic as possible. By regularly upgrading, both front and back end users can benefit from performance and speed improvements to your site.

4. Bug fixes – Websites regularly change with new content and code changes, and considering the number of moving parts, any website can have techicnal conflicts and unforeseen effects of CMS changes. By keeping your site up to date, you get all the bug fixes identified by WordPress and their huge user base to make sure your site is working the best it can.

5. Features – Every website update is built to make your life as a website owner or manager easier. This means you can often get new features in an update to help speed up editing the website. For example, WordPress 4.0 came with improved plugin install experience, 4.1 introduced inline image editing, and 4.2 came with faster plugin updates.

6. Long term upgrades – If you decide not to upgrade your WordPress site for a few years, you could face difficult technical problems when you do upgrade. There was 8 new versions of WordPress just in 2017, and with each there comes new featurs, fixes and security. If you skip a large number of versions, this can cause conflicts with other parts of your site.

Talk to our development team today to find out how we can check your site is health and make sure your technology is up to date.